In one context, a building design, in the form of architectural drawings (preliminary drawings), is provided to an engineer or design professional who applies codes, standards and rules to prepare and adjust the building design as necessary to ensure regulatory compliance and to meet the client's individual requirements. During this process, the design professional generates sufficient detail for the production of detailed engineering drawings and specifications suitable for construction including the location and type of electrical services, all of which are subject to regulatory or higher design criteria. The detailed drawings are usually done by a team of skilled draftspersons, who may also be design professionals. These professionals also inject individuality and further detail into the final design.
In Applicant's previous U.S. Pat. No. 6,999,907 assigned to Draftlogic System, Inc., Alberta, Canada, a process is provided for automating the determination of detailed engineering specifications and production of detailed engineering CAD drawings from a client's raw architectural drawings. An architectural drawing comprises a multitude of drawings elements but it also comprises assets formed of such drawings elements including corridors, rooms and utility rooms, all of which have different requirements for electrical and mechanical services, standards and compliance. The architectural drawing, containing an architectural structure, is parsed to locate the structure's determinative assets. Standards applicable to at least the functional characteristics of the assets are applied for generating the detailed features necessary for production of detailed engineered drawings. Further, the client's known professional preferences can be imparted, while still resulting in detailed designs that conforms to the client's personal and professional expectations.
An example of Applicant prior process is the generation of drawings which include: number and capacity of electrical components which are substantially compatible with a raw architectural preliminary layout specifying boundaries or rooms and location of electrical components.
To date electrical circuiting has still required the application of professional skill, application of various rules of thumb and estimating.
Some automation has been attempted in CAD programs such as through manual user interaction, specifically through the manual picking of like and adjacent electrical services on a CAD drawing, which are to be circuited together, the optimal arrangements being performed by the human user. A user selects a circuit and then select the components to put on that circuit. The selected components are tagged with the chosen circuit number a panel schedule is populated with the total load for the circuit. Further, individual clients or draftspersons are expected to distinguish a room from a corridor, and then define which of the various types of rooms receive which level of services (e.g. dedicated electrical outlets) and how the service will be supplied (e.g. through the floor or from the ceiling).
This known process, is laborious and inflexible. It is inevitable that there will be changes in the overall design which arise during the usually protracted duration between obtaining preliminary drawings and final issuance of the detailed drawings. Changes require the human user to repeat the selection steps. Further, the resulting level and quality of the details in the design is variable due to many levels of design input, from the design professional to the draftspersons. There is a need to repeatedly and dynamically revise each drawing, in a domino effect, for changes which arise in one or more related drawings. Revisions can result in a fragmentation of an originally well-ordered circuit structure, with deletions and merely appending of newly revised circuits.
About one half of the time expended, between obtaining preliminary drawings and issuance of the detailed design drawings, is consumed in the detailed drafting portion. This creates two main disadvantages: a significant time delay, and a related increase in cost.
Further, while an architect, design professional or other client is constrained by many known and standardized codes, there are also instances where the known codes are inapplicable and personal judgment is applied or where the client's or design professional's personal standards exceed those of the codes. Each time the design process is commissioned, those personal and professional judgments or standards must be communicated to and be known by the draftsperson, generally through a working relationship developed over time, so that that appropriate standards and codes are utilized. Often the draftsperson simply adopts a number of personal and professional judgments or standards that are known, or which are assumed to be preferred by the design professional and those become the rules which are applied to the detailed design drawings.
Typically, under budget pressures, the actual design process is a combination of personal designer judgment and CAD tools. Accordingly, in a conservative approach to design, and avoid tedious recursive calculations, a designer might overspecify lighting for a particular room, ultimately resulting in too much light for the room's purpose, an initial higher capital cost for fixtures and wiring, perhaps requiring an increase in wire size for the circuit, and a needless increase in energy requirements in operation. In the future, there is more waste in renovation or demolition.
Further, due to the difficulty involved in establishing the actual wiring, considering possible circuit grouping or routing options, it is a common practice in the industry to simply avoid illustrating wiring on the electrical drawing at all and leave the actual routing of wiring to the field installers. Simply, there are a large number of manhours expended in the mere drawing of branch circuit wiring especially when following the more stringent routing rules for conduit and wire compared to the more relaxed rules for drawing armored cable.
Accordingly, there is identified a need for a system to aid the design professional, clients and client-engineers who wish to improve the detailed design process for the production of electrical engineering drawings including to achieve the following: reduced turnaround, reduced costs, repeatedly and reliably applied personalized standards, and reduced overhead on the design professional where professional and standard codes are known and where individual professional standards can be learned and applied.